“I’m not sure that this would be ideal to present on Arabic social media,” says “N.” as we gaze into the endless pile of cars, many completely burnt, in what came to be known as the “car graveyard” in southern Israel. “If anything, they would celebrate it even more.”
“Well, I guess it all depends on the framing,” I say, thinking of the iconic 2021 picture of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sitting on a couch right outside a destroyed building in Gaza, a victorious smile on his face, which for some reason meant victory for the other side. “For many, it’s all an issue of ‘antariyat,” I add, referring to the Arabic term best defined as boasting and acting tough and bombastic without much of a basis.
N. and I were part of a delegation of activists on social media in Arabic, taken to the Gaza border communities by a team from the IDF Arabic spokesperson’s office. As we were taken around the car graveyard, the Re’im forest where the carnage at the Supernova music festival took place, and the horrible sights of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, these questions of narrative and framing rose time and time again.
Shirel Liberman, the head of our delegation, serves in her day-to-day life as a deputy CEO of a Jerusalem nonprofit that promotes the city’s policy and research. After the war started, she pulled all her strings to organize tours of public diplomacy activists and content creators to the disaster areas, “to let the world know,” as she put it. “Many had already seen pictures and posts, but it’s only when you walk around and experience things for yourself that you begin to grasp the reality that [people] underwent here,” she says.
Back at the car graveyard, Shirel says somberly: “Many of these cars contained remnants of those who tried to escape the Supernova music festival in Re’im, whose only sin was to dance at a festival promoting peace and love, but who were subject to deadly ambushes across Road 232, popularly nicknamed ‘the Death Road.’ That’s why some say [the cars] must be buried, somehow.”
After stopping at the missile-proof safe room where Aner Shapira heroically lost his life after repelling seven hand grenades thrown into the structure by Hamas terrorists, we arrived at the Re’im forest. We meet up with Major Ella Waweya, a Muslim woman born in Kalansuwa who serves under Avichay Adraee, the IDF spokesman to Arab media.
Nowadays, “Captain Ella” (still called that even after being the first Arab woman to be promoted to IDF major) is herself a well-known face on social media in Arabic. She takes us through the makeshift exhibition at the place: poles stuck to the ground, a small, circular patch of grass and flowers growing under each: modest yet majestic.
“This is from Allah, it has to be from Allah,” adds Rabbi Tsachi Fenton, another participant who is fluent in Arabic. “Look at the blossoming of the greenery under every pole. It’s essentially a miracle.”
I ask Fenton what messages he wants to convey to the Arab world. He answers: “Our war is not against Arabs or Muslims. In Israel, you’ll find equal rights for everyone. But attitude begets attitude – and we will eliminate anyone who tries to eliminate us.”
Captain Ella smiles grimly and adds: “Only one word can describe this exhibition: intisar – victory.” I raise my eyebrows. “These smiles – ibtisam – are our victory: intisar. The ruh, the soul – it might be gone. But their smiles will remain for eternity, as the plants will blossom.”
THESE WORDS resonated soundly against the backdrop of the fighting spirit that the entire country took upon itself following the horrible October 7 Hamas attack on Israel in which 1,200 people were murdered and some 240 taken hostage. Nevertheless, I wondered: what are the narratives that we must build – and project – upon the ruins of our destroyed communities? How much of this is bombastic antariyat and how much is real?
I remembered how, in the first days after the massacre, headlines in some Arabic-speaking outlets – especially those funded by the same actors as Hamas – were filled with gloating over the grief and loss felt in Israel. Every aching remark uttered by an Israeli official was instantaneously translated and splotched across the screen, as if to say: “They admit their defeat: Hamas did it.”
Indeed, there are differences in the modus operandi of the media in different parts of the world. This is salient especially when it comes to media outlets directed by totalitarian regimes, in which the media does not serve as a means to portray reality or criticize decision-makers, but rather as a direct mouthpiece of the regime itself.
Should we consider these differences when we build our message, or should we expose our inner worlds completely? And what effects would each have on the moral, military, and even diplomatic levels?
“What kinds of messages work in the Arab world?”
“Arabic-speaking media is diverse,” says Major Waweya. “One channel would focus on footage of the poor children of Gaza, while another channel would convey our [Israel’s] messages in one form or another,” she explains.
“Then there’s a difference between your target audiences. You have the enemy, Hamas, which you must deter by showing your achievements and how you are dismantling them,” Captain Ella says. “Then you have the Gazan civilians. We try to remind them that Hamas started this war, which we never wanted in the first place, and thus it’s Hamas that bears responsibility.
“The third message is our legitimacy to act. Some Arab countries have no idea what is happening, and you must make it accessible to them, and remind them that our war is not against Gazans but against Hamas, who came into Israel and murdered our civilians,” she says. “Hamas operates not only against us but against Gazan citizens as well. They hide underground or in Qatar, Lebanon, Turkey, or London – they all have food, and they think they’re safe, though we will reach all of them.”
“Is there a way to make sure that the IDF Spokesperson’s messages come through?”
The military’s Arab spokeswoman tells about some of the most successful messages they conveyed – the ones calling for the evacuation of Gazans southward. The IDF divided the Gaza Strip into blocks and then distributed pamphlets from the air that explained which ones would have to be evacuated and when. And although Hamas claimed at first that nobody was leaving, the drizzle of evacuees soon became a flood of hundreds of thousands who made it to the southern part of the Strip.
“By now, Gazans await our announcements – not their leaders’ – and they trust us more than they trust them,” Waweya says.
Did Hamas’s reputation among citizens change in any way?
Waweya brings up some of the clips circulating online of citizens cursing at Hamas and its leaders. At that point, a short debate kicks off among the participants concerning whether these clips are at all representative of the popular view. The spokeswoman responds simply: “They know very well what might happen to them for openly criticizing Hamas, yet they do it anyway.”
THE GROUP then splits to create content in Arabic, in an attempt to convey their different messages regarding terror, loss, and victory: some film videos or record interviews in Arabic, much to the surprise of other visitors around. I, too, wander around them, going deeper into the forest with its beautiful fields of poppies and crowned daisies, trying to capture these feelings, attempting to find a balancing point between what I want to say, what I want people to hear, and what I feel inside.
On the way back to the cars, I meet Hussein, a Druze from Shfaram, who initiated a “war room” for content-creating in Arabic during the war, alongside his partners Daniel and Bashar. Hussein has some reservations regarding the “regular” Israeli faces who convey messages in Arabic.
“For many in the Arab world, these faces are just propaganda machines paid by the Mossad,” he explains amusedly. “What is needed is something more authentic – Arab Israeli figures who at some point will be known to the public in Arabic-speaking spheres. We have encountered some difficulties in terms of the TikTok algorithm, but we’re doing the best we can,” he adds.
The war room also found some support from a handful of ministries. “I think that it’s problematic that much of the Israeli hasbara [public diplomacy] efforts in Arabic are the same known faces. They have huge numbers of likes, comments and views – but people are mostly cursing at them. Does this mean that your message got through? I wouldn’t be so sure. And I say this with utmost respect and love for all of them,” Hussein emphasizes.
“There are a lot of conspiracy theories running around the Arabic-speaking spheres. Some still say to this day that everything Israel does or says that happened is a farce,” he adds simply as we get ready to drive to the next destination.
We drive around the peripheral road, right by the newly reinstalled Kfar Aza security fence, much taller and sturdier than the previous one, some parts of which are still left trampled, remnants of the violent breaching on October 7. Empty houses with spray-painted symbols dot the place, “clear” scrawled on some of them by IDF forces after they had cleared the houses of terrorists.
We pull up to a beautiful street with small, one-story houses, some with bikes and baby seats that have been left outside for months. “Make no mistake, some of these houses look intact from the outside, but on the inside they were heavily damaged during clashes between terrorists and the soldiers who came to rescue the families,” says Zohar Shpak, our guide and head of the security platoon of Kfar Aza. He is one of a handful of citizens who roam the streets of this beautiful ghost community.
SHPAK HAS lived in Kfar Aza since 2004 after moving here from a northern kibbutz. We stop by a sign reading “The Jimmy Lookout,” a beautiful flowery garden planted in memory of Kfar Aza’s only victim of a terror attack until October 7.
Jimmy Kdoshim was killed when a Hamas rocket was shot at his home in 2008. Shpak tells us that Jimmy was a para-glider who distributed candy from the skies every holiday. In a twisted turn of events, this garden was also one of the landing spots of Hamas terrorists who para-glided into the kibbutz on their bloody quest to murder, rape, and kidnap as many civilians as possible.
“We were sure that our sense of smell was developed, that we could tell when an escalation was near. Needless to say, this wasn’t the case on October 7. We walk around with this terrible sense of betrayal from within and from the outside,” our guide says.
“From within, it’s crystal clear – we had a contract with the state, and we complied with the entirety of the terms, including some extras such as raising children with scars and evacuating every now and then. The state, however, did not comply with its part – not the army, not the government, not with anyone who should have been there to prevent the massacre,” he says angrily.
“As for the betrayal from outside,” Shpak adds hesitantly, “people here all understood that peace was not attainable in the near future, since the education over there will not change,” he says, pointing toward Gaza. “But we did try to create a reality in which their next generation will somehow speak to our next generation.”
SHPAK TELLS us about his membership and activities at Baderech Lehachlama (The Road to Recovery), a nonprofit organization in which volunteers drove Gazan children to Israeli hospitals to receive treatment.
“We had a shared exhibition from the two sides of the fence.” he recalls. “We mobilized several times to collect products for the poor in Gaza. We knew that salvation would not come from the al-Qassam militants. But then we started to see videos circulating in which citizens – not militants – were cheering for the massacre, looting our homes and our cars with which we drove them to the hospitals, taking everything from refrigerators to little toddler cars...
“This was a hard blow for us, a sort of disillusionment,” he laments. “Waking up from an ideological dream at the age of 58 is not at all simple,” he adds with a sigh.
We look around; Shpak tells us not to take pictures of the houses or enter any of them to protect the families’ privacy. Suddenly, I notice the house behind us, surrounded by police tape, the name “Idan” written on a sign outside.
As Shpak was telling us about the horrible events that unfolded during that dark day, I couldn’t help but imagine three-year-old toddler Avigail running away from that same house after witnessing the cold-blooded murder of her parents, Roee and Smadar, attempting to find shelter with the neighbors. She was taken as a hostage into Gaza while her two siblings, nine-year-old Michael and six-year-old Amalia, hid silently inside a closet for hours.
Kfar Aza’s security platoon leader then also tells the horrifying story of the twin Berdichevsky babies, who were less than a year old on October 7, and who remained for 13 hours inside their safe room alongside the bodies of their murdered parents, Hadar and Itai. Their crying was used as bait by the sadistic Hamas fanatics to kill anyone who would try to come near and save them – until they were saved by the now-fallen commander of Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, Lt.-Col. Tomer Grinberg.
Then Shpak takes us through some destroyed and damaged houses, some of them burned to the ground by Hamas terrorists with entire families inside, finally stopping at what is known as the “young neighborhood” – four rows of destroyed and heavily damaged one-story humble apartments dedicated to young adults from the kibbutz and outside, with only a living room, a safe room, and a small kitchen in each. On each house hung a large sign featuring the names and smiling faces of those who were brutally murdered on the spot by Hamas fanatics.
Only one house is open to the public, that of Sivan Elkabetz and Naor Hasidim. The young couple’s house features a small exhibition of photos taken by Sivan’s mother Anat. It includes images from within the house before it was cleared, to some extent, as well as an enlarged poster with Sivan’s final correspondence with Sivan over WhatsApp.
Dozens, if not hundreds of bullet holes are visible all over the house, pointing at the sadistic usage of weapons – all directly aimed at one young couple who hid in their safe room. One especially chilling picture shows the words “remnants of a person on the couch” scribbled with a marker, hinting at the terrible fate that the two suffered.
HERE, TOO, the group spreads out to create some more content. Would showing these terrible scenes of destruction and betrayal to circles sympathizing with Hamas prove brave, or foolish? Would they be moved, angered, or elated instead? Would our stories even make an impact?
As we continue on from the kibbutz’s peripheral road that looks out at the Gazan neighborhood of Shajaiya, Shpak points out the site where clashes took place between the sadistic Hamas terrorists and members of the IDF’s Duvdevan unit, who came to save the civilians. I realize that this is the spot where a relative of mine, St.-Sgt. Yosef Malachi Guedalia, fell while fighting bravely to defend the kibbutz on that fateful day, and whisper a little prayer and some Psalms.
This handful of people have access to be able to spread messages throughout the Arab world. What kinds of messages would you convey, as a resident of Kfar Aza who witnessed all these atrocities? As we continue and look out onto the Gazan neighborhood of Shajaiya from the kibbutz’s peripheral road, Shpak answers thoughtfully.
“To the Gazans, I say that they will have to work extra hard to regain my trust. I say this to you as someone who dies to go into Gaza and speak to the citizens, and who used to drive their children voluntarily to Israeli hospitals. The trust between me and them is essentially nonexistent. To Arabs in the Arab world, I say – you too must disavow this and build real trust.”
On the way back to the Jimmy Lookout, one participant stops Shpak to ask him what his reaction would’ve been had the massacre taken place in Judea and Samaria. Our guide does not hesitate.
“I might have different opinions from the settlers there, but they too have a contract with the state. They were sent there by the government, and a failure of the state to provide protection there has the exact same implications as it has here,” he responded. Fenton, who lives over the Green Line in Elkana, approaches Shpak and gives him a big hug. Everyone is moved.
I walk back to the car and gaze around at the beautiful green fields surrounding the kibbutz, a majestic scene that doesn’t reveal anything about the horrors committed in the community only four months ago. I try to digest everything I saw and heard: the building of narratives while catering to specific audiences, the virtues of expressing victory and loss, the framing of discourse, the shattering of ideologies, the sense of betrayal, and the terrible scenes of sadistic violence.
I give the Idan’s house one final look, one final tear, and drive away.